The Silence of Animals by John Gray: review

John Gray’s study of the human condition, The Silence of Animals, intrigues
Jane Shilling.

In modern Western society, the melancholy experiences of the last century have largely (though not entirely) put us off the idea that the remedy for mankind’s ills is an -ism, forcibly applied. The brutal utopianisms of imperialism, Nazism and communism are generally regarded by right-thinking people as a kind of atrocious collective delirium. We look back on those passages of our collective experience as a man convalescing from a dangerous fever might recollect his febrile ravings – with a horrified determination never to return to those shameful states of delusion.

But the human inclination to meddle with the status quo is irrepressible: we can’t not be doing something. With utopianism off the list of possibilities, meliorism – or the notion that every day in every way, things are getting better and better (or would be, if only a different political party had won the last election) – seems an attractive alternative.

Eschewing convulsive messiness in the form of revolutions and invasions, meliorism imagines a brighter future arrived at by gentler means: education; a respectful relationship with the environment; the eradication of poverty, ignorance and disease; and, of course, capitalism (properly regulated) – all leading to a moment in the not unimaginably distant future when peace and prosperity will cover all the world. Or something along those lines.

Who could possibly object to such a benevolent vision? Well, the political philosopher John Gray, for a start. Gray, whose academic career included professorships at the London School of Economics, Oxford, Harvard and Yale, is a critic of the neo-liberal philosophy that proposes that advances in human scientific knowledge will necessarily be accompanied by equivalent progress in ethics and politics.

Having scourged the delusions of neo-liberalism in Straw Dogs (2002), which was chosen as their book of the year by readers including Will Self and Andrew Marr, Gray returns to the subject in The Silence of Animals, in which he examines the human condition through the prism of literature.

His title is taken from an essay by the Swiss theologian Max Picard, who argues that the silence of animals is “unredeemed… a hard, coagulated silence”, whereas that of humans is “transparent and bright because it confronts the world”.

Gray, characteristically, disagrees with this view, arguing that, while other animals may lack the interior monologue with which humans are accustomed to construct their self-image, “it is not clear why this should put humans on a higher plane. Why should breaking silence and then loudly struggling to renew it be such an achievement?” Humans, he argues, “cannot help seeing the world through the veil of language”.

To the brisk relish for contentiousness exemplified by his riff on silence, Gray adds a lively taste for invective, characterising philosophers who might argue that “humans can never be silent because the mind is made of words” as “half-witted logicians”.

His book is organised into three sections. In the first, he considers the systems – political, religious and economic – devised by humans to try to impose meaning on the chaos of existence; in the second, he explores the mythologies of psychoanalysis and the ways in which we try to pursue meaning through language; in the third, he considers the stratagems employed by writers and philosophers who have sought a connection with the essence of being more intimate than that offered by mere language.

Readers unfamiliar with Gray’s current world view (his political sympathies have shifted over the decades from Right to Left to his current position of broadly pessimistic scepticism) may find his book as exasperating as it is engaging.

Its tone is that of a man somewhat detached from the vulgar hurly-burly of life, observing the antics of his fellow humans with a complicated mixture of distaste and compassion.

Gray’s quasi-Stoical stance (Montaigne-like in style, but without the Frenchman’s deep-rooted kindness and comic self-knowledge) may seem inaccessible to those who have, perforce, to engage with the world as it is; or who, against the odds, still harbour idealistic notions of mankind’s susceptibility to improvement.

But even for readers who disagree with him, his book is full of richness: he is extraordinarily well read. Llewelyn Powys (younger brother of the better-known John Cowper Powys) and J A Baker are not exactly household names, but their nature writing, as quoted by Gray, is too ravishing not to explore further. And he sends one back, generously, to the writings of Norman Lewis, J G Ballard, Richard Jefferies, Alexander Herzen and a host of others. For that alone, his book is a pleasure to read.

The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths by John Gray